- Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before, even if they have some value. So yes, that Kindle or iPad or whatever will have a real use, and you will be marginally happier with it than without, but not as much as you think

- You can talk yourself into (or out of) anything. The only difference between smart people and other people is that smart people do this with bigger words and more complex arguments. Be confident, but also assume that you are broken in ways you can never spot. Find some ways to get a checksum on life decisions every now and then.

- You don't need very much at all. Maybe a laptop computer and a couple changes of clothes. Pictures and videos of your life. That's about it.

- Nothing will ever replace experiences. No matter how big the car, nice the house, or professional-looking the suit, it's never going to be as much fun or mean as much later as the experiences you have in life. And it's not just having the experience, it's looking forward to them, and planning them, and making pictures, movies, and blogs out of them. The best part, oddly, may be the planning. So planning a 200-dollar trip to the beach in the Fall with people you love may give you many hours of happiness this summer -- along with the fun of the trip itself.

- Learn to keep picking topics and immersing yourself in them. Most everybody will say to drop out and become part of the system -- 9-5 job and TV/games/internet in the evening. If you want a life you could sleep through, that's fine. But if you want a life you can tell stories about, keep reinventing yourself. And that means constantly learning.

- Lots of shit in life that once looked dumb or stupid opens up into this huge panorama of beauty once you learn the rules. In so many things you are like the guy who never saw a baseball game going to the world series. You kind of get it, but it all seems silly. You don't know the rules. Decide to learn how to appreciate music, for instance. Get a few college lectures on tape, get some good music to listen to, hang out with folks who are music connoisseurs. The more you know about various art forms, the richer your life is.

- Forget philosophy and meaning-of-life shit. You're too young. For now, you are what you do. Go do something worthwhile

- Stick to a daily exercise routine at all costs

- If you are changing and getting better, that means you are changing friends too. This was very difficult for me, but you can't hang out with the same folks and expect to become a better person. There are exceptions, of course, but to a large degree your life is controlled by whom you choose to be friends and hang out with. Be aware that you don't want to be the same person at 30 as you were at 20. I'm not saying be an asshole -- keep being friendly by all means -- but be very careful who you hold yourself up against as "normal"

- Dating is a numbers game, like a lot of other things. Learn the skills of dating and don't sweat picking up chicks (or guys)

- Concentrate on your weaknesses. Make them stronger. When you get to your 30s you can work from your strengths, but there has to be some time in your life to work on shit you suck at, and for me it was when I had the most motivation, my 20s.

- Speaking of which, you have to learn management. No matter what you do, there will be a manager. Even if you don't want to be one, you have to understand what the job is like to help out your manager. Being a good leader means being a good servant. This concept sounded easy (or facile) to me in my 20s, but proved hard to apply in practice.

- You are never ready for kids. Have them early while you have energy. Read all the books about kids if you must, but realize that creating a replacement is about the most biologically easy thing you could do. After all, evolution has been working on making you a great gene transferral and primate-raising machine, so don't get paranoid and neurotic about all the latest parenting fashion. Use some sense.

- Everybody wants to be a rock star and win the lottery. Nobody ever does, and the ones that do end up destroying their life. Realize slow success is a million times better than overnight success.

- Much of the stuff in life that normal people do is geared around killing time by distracting you with shiny things of no value. You may never be able to fight this completely, but you should at least deeply understand it and how it affects your goals

- Create. With a passion. There are two major kinds of people in this world, consumers and creators. The herd will push you to consume, life will push you to consume, consumption is the easy and default path, but true joy and a full life come from creating. It does not matter one bit how many people like what you create, just create. Write. Blog. Make videos. Make a movie. Write a program. The longer the format and the more creativity involved, the more you are going to turn on and exercise key parts of your brain. Nobody wants to be 80 and only have stories of being at the office, but fuck, if you were at the office creating something at least you tried to make a difference. I'd rather be that guy than the one who watched Sumo wrestling everyday (or played 20,000 hours of WoW during his 20s) The only thing you're going to have at the end of your life are the decisions you made, the things you created, and memories. Learn to maximize these things.

Good man. This is the sort of irrelevant detail beloved of pedants. It does not make you a better programmer to know this sort of thing.

You probably should know your language's idioms, but this sort of detail is not useful. I'd rather see a few extraneous parens around things that the compiler can happily remove. This sort of attitude is why my Perl code tends to be readable. There are all sorts of shortcuts and simplifications if you know the edge cases of the language, but I'd rather have clarity than cleverness.

e.g. my Perl coding style: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/more-fun-with-toys-ikea-lillabo-...

I wish I could take a month off! My manager won't let me, unfortunately: he gets all anxious and irritable after a few days whenever I don't show up at work.

(I'm self-employed.)

I was one of the hacker employees of the FSF back in the early days of the HURD project. They pay was modest by industry standards but fair (every employee, hacker or not, got the same pay -- later the formation of a union was encouraged).

Some very good and lasting work got done back then, in spite of our rather unconventional work habits. I'm thinking especially of all the work done laying down the foundation of GNU libc. Roland McGrath got a lot of code rolling and, perhaps more importantly, established a pretty good standard of coding conventions and quality expectations.

I did not myself work directly on the HURD but in our small office I did have chats with McGrath and Bushnell about it. The sentiment around the design was, I think it fair to say, somewhat giddy. The free software movement was (and is) all about freeing users from subjugation to those who provide software. The HURD's microkernel architecture and the structure of the daemons would securely free users from subjugation to system administrators - each user could securely invoke a set of daemons to create the operating environment he or she wished, no special permissions required.

It was well understood back then, and even a point of discussion in academia, that a microkernel architecture posed some difficult problems for performance (related mostly to a greater number of context switches as messages pass between daemons rather than syscalls being handled by a monolithic kernel). Rashid's work had suggested that this problem was not so terribly significant after all. And so, at least to me, it felt like the GNU project was not only doing this shoestring-budget freedom-fighting hacking, but also leading near the bleeding edge of CS research made practical. Well, that was the theory, anyway, and we were mighty proud of ourselves and generally excited to be there.

Not much but some of the hacking of the core staff took place "from home". You must remember that this before any kind of data over voice or particularly high bandwidth connection was commonplace - so that hacking was over modem connected to text terminal. Mostly we hacked in a shared office which, if you saw it, you'd think "Wow, that's a slightly large closet." We were, at that time, guests of MIT.

With all due respect for RMS, and I don't think he'd especially disagree with this (though I could be wrong): he was an absolutely terrible project leader for the hacking part. As history has shown, his popularity among some notwithstanding, he's extraordinarily good at the political part of his works. Leading the technical project? Not so much.

It wasn't so much that he dictated bad technical choices. Even the choice to use Mach might have worked out. On the contrary, he was relatively "hands off" in most technical matters, only micromanaging if you really dragged his attention to some detail. It was more that he lacked any coherent overall strategy for completing GNU and his broad directives involved underestimations of the amount of work involved and were sometimes scattered, even bordering on inconsistent. It just wasn't his strength.

The original vision for the GNU system, at least as I understood it, was to - sure - grow a unix clone, but then to build a user space that much more closely resembled that of lisp machines. Emacs (with its lisp extensibility) was taken to be a paradigm for how interactive programs might work. Originally, it was even envisioned that the window system would be lisp based.

One early change to the original GNU vision occurred when it became clear that X11 worked pretty well and was here to stay and would be free software. As a practical matter: just use that.

Later, as mentioned in other comments here, the ECGS fork of GCC caused issues - ultimately leading to the displacement of an FSF appointed project leader. There is some back story to that. The company Cygnus (later acquired by Red Hat, founded by M. Tiemann et al.) had been advertising to customers that not only could they develop customized extensions to GCC, but that they could shepherd those extensions into the "official releases". There was frustration at Cygnus and some other firms that the FSF branch was not merging these changes quickly enough or was arguably being too prickly about the nature of the changes. As nearly as I can tell those sentiments led to the ECGS fork and RMS was ultimately put in the position of having to choose between "blessing" that fork or simply losing any claim at all to the future of GCC.

Around this time, I am told but can not myself verify, RMS was also under pressure from some key FSF advisors or supporters to exit the software development business and focus on the politics. Whatever the motivation, the FSF shed most of its in-house development efforts.

The pattern of losing the original GNU vision continued in the controversy over Gnome vs. KDE. Originally, KDE had licensing issues and did not pass muster with the FSF as being free software. Those problems have since been fixed but at the time it led to RMS' proclamation that Gnome would be the desktop for GNU -- a radical departure from what was originally conceived. Later, as you may have read, RMS came to describe Miguel as a traitor to the free software movement.

Somewhere in there - I'd have to look things up to get the timelines exactly right - Debian took off, in part to try to fill a void in the FSF's leadership at assembling a complete GNU system. Bruce Perens penned the now famous "Debian Guidelines".

A small group of relatively wealthy influencers, including Tiemann, met with Eric Raymond and conjured up the allegedly business-friendly "open source" notion. The main differentiation they sought from the FSF is that they would not condemn proprietary software or describe themselves as a freedom movement - they sought to emphasize the economic advantages of having volunteers do work for no pay. In my view, their main purpose upon founding was to attempt to politically marginalize RMS (a project in which they've had some success).

Bushnell moved on to a different stage of his life and, I guess it's fair to say, a higher calling. McGrath moved on to what I gather is a sweet job for Red Hat. The GNU project was gutted. Its institutional memory and such momentum as it may have had was gone. This was in part because RMS was not so great as a project leader but also, in large part, because the project was under significant attack.

In my humble opinion, there would be plenty good to come of a resurrection of the GNU project. I don't necessarily mean a resurrection of the HURD although I suspect we can do better than the Linux kernel. I do mean a return to a concentrated effort to build the kind of user space originally envisioned. While such a project could have enormous social benefit, I don't see any way to institute it and find support enough to carry it out.

The title of this article is a bit confusing.

Given that the blog itself is called "Planning For Failure," I expected it to be about how Greyhound "knew" how to fail in a graceful manner. I read through about halfway until I realized it was just a rant about failure at various points in Greyhound's ticketing system.

Nothing wrong with that, just not the article I was expecting to read.

Man, forgive me for being blunt, but there's a lot of loser talk in this thread. "Oh you can't learn from others mistakes, you'll make them, blah blah blah..." - no, this is how people feel better about themselves for having not listened to advice and getting wrecked in their own life because of it. Sure, you'll make mistakes, but you shouldn't just accept wandering blindly through life dealing with stuff. This is what most people do, mind you - wander blindly through life. Like, there's tons of literature on good parenting. How many people read it? Like, none. So then they justify their bad parenting by saying "well, we all have to make our mistakes" - bullshit. Bullshit lazy talk. This is like the "you've got to earn your stripes the hard way" thing - sometimes you do, but sometimes you don't. But people who got their stripes the hard way often hate people who get them an easier way. Ignore those people.

Okay, that said, this thread was really good:

"Ask HN: What streetsmarts have you learnt?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366217

I'll paste my comment from that thread, it's absolutely true and I learned it the hard way. Also, I admire you for being proactive and looking for advice to build a smarter, better life with.

--

Track record, track record, track record, track record. Look at the track record. Track records don't lie. Track record, track record, track record.

Someone fired from all their jobs is probably going to be a menace later in some form or fashion.

Someone who ended all their relationships on bad terms is going to end on bad terms with you.

Strong starters/non-finishers are going to start strong but likely won't be able to close it out without extra help later... which you might be oblivious to, because they'd started so strongly.

Track records don't lie. Unless you're really good at spotting diamonds in the rough, don't grab someone with a bad track record for an important role in your business and life. I've learned this one the hard way too many times. I still get tempted with, "Wow, this guy/girl is so amazing, the problem must've been the other people..."

I'm trying to not do that any more. Once? Quite possibly a fluke. Twice? Maybe... Three times? That's a track record. Also, people will always say they've changed. It's probably a bad idea to be the first person to test out whether it's real or not.

Just think of the new Bag of Crap possibilities. I'm sure Amazon warehouses are full of stuff they need to dispose of.